To an Angel · 11

He was not long in attaining such good fortune. The princess appeared at the casement, and the little shepherd stood dazzled by that moon-coloured skin and that hair of sidereal strands. He knew not how to express his admiration and send a greeting to the enchanting damsel; it occurred to him to sing, to play his reed pipe... but they would hear him; to gather and throw a posy of cornflowers, daisies, and poppies... but the high, traceried window was inaccessible. Then an extraordinary idea came to him. He procured a shard of glass, and as soon as he was able to slip once more into the enclosure through the cave, he focused the glass in such a way that, catching a ray of sunlight upon it, he knew how to direct it toward the princess. She, marvelled, closed her eyes, and upon opening them again to see who was sending a ray of sunlight to her boudoir, descried the little shepherd gazing at her in ecstasy. The captive maiden smiled, the enamoured lad understood that his gift was accepted... and from that time forth, every day at the same hour, the sparkle of the rainbow cast by a piece of glass cheered the little princess’s solitude and sang her a loving hymn, which mingled with the deep voice of the forest yonder in the distance...

All at once there came a radical change in the life of the princess. Her father and her brother fell in battle, and the succession to the throne devolved upon her. A brilliant retinue of lords, warriors, bishops, pages, and ladies came solemnly to seek her out and escort her to the capital of her realm. And she who a few days before conversed only with the birds, and waited only for the shepherd lad’s ray of sunlight, found herself acclaimed by thousands of voices, stunned by the clamour of splendid festivities; she admired the illuminations among the foliage, heard the secret music in the garden, whirled with dancing couples, and learned what glory, wealth, pleasure, delirious passion, and mad joy were...

Many, many years had passed when the princess, now queen—and now almost an old woman—had the whim to visit that tower where her father, out of precaution and tyrannical mistrust, had kept her immured during the fairest moments of her youth. Upon entering the boudoir, a painful nostalgia, a kind of romantic melancholy seized upon the queen and compelled her to lean upon the mullioned window, feeling her eyes heavy with tears. Dusk was falling, setting the horizon ablaze; the forest exhaled its deep, melodious murmur... and the queen, covering her face with her hands, felt the drops of weeping trickle slowly between her parted fingers. Was she weeping, perchance, at remembering what she had suffered in the keep; the long captivity, the loneliness, the isolation, the weariness? How ill do you know the hearts of women, you who attribute the tears of so exalted a lady to that!

Know that, from the moment she set foot in the tower, the queen missed the ray of sunlight which every day, at the same hour, the enamoured shepherd lad had sent her by means of a piece of glass. For that piece of glass the sovereign would now have given the richest diamonds of her royal crown. Only that ray could illuminate her heart, weary, injured, broken, withered. And as she let her tears trickle down, without caring to check them or wipe them away with her emblazoned handkerchief, she wept for youth, for illusion, for the mysterious vital energy of the springtide of life... Never again would the shepherd boy send her the divine ray.

The Good Old Days

Whenever we entered the study of the Count of Lobeira, my gaze was drawn—before the authentic weapons, the Hispano-Moresque pottery, and the scraps of embossed leather that covered the wall—to a woman’s portrait, painted by a very skilful hand, which by its costume indicated having a date of approximately a century ago.—«It is my great-grandmother, Doña Magdalena Varela de Tobar, twenty-second Countess of Lobeira»—the Count had said, answering my inquisitive query in the tone of one who does not care to explain further or knows nothing else. And for the time being I had to rest content, resorting to my fancy to develop the ideas inspired by the portrait.

It represented a lady of about five-and-thirty years, with an elongated and gaunt countenance, and austere lines that bespoke a simple, pure existence, devoted to the fulfilment of noble duties and to household toil, the law of the strong matron of bygone ages. The modesty of attire in so exalted a lady seemed to me exemplary; that close-fitting bodice of black bombazine, that little white kerchief fastened at the throat by an escutcheon of Our Lady of Sorrows, that hair smoothed down and gathered behind the ear, were priceless indications for delineating the moral physiognomy of the aristocratic dame. There could be no doubt: Doña Magdalena had embodied the type of the loyal, chaste, and submissive wife, faithful guardian of the hearth fire; of the dignified and venerated mother, before whom her children bow as before a queen; of the indefatigable, vigilant, and provident housewife, whose presence commands respect and whose hand scatters abundance and wellbeing. Thus it surprised me exceedingly when one day, asking the Count at what period the finest estates and rich domains of his house had been alienated, he answered me gloomily, pointing to the portrait in question:

“In the time of Doña Magdalena.”

The unexpected detail heightened my interest. By dint of staring at the portrait, I observed that the painting offered a rare and ever suggestive peculiarity: wherever I stood in the room to look at it, Doña Magdalena’s eyes followed me with an imperious, burning expression. Whether a casual stroke of the brush or a boast of skill on the painter’s part, the pupils of the portrait were touched with such art that they repaid with greed and energy the gaze of anyone contemplating them from afar. Sometimes, involuntarily, I looked up as though drawn by that singularity, feeling the eyes summon me. The severity of the dark background against which the head stood out, and the single bright note of face and kerchief, enhanced the power of that strange gaze.

Although the Count of Lobeira is of a reserved, cold disposition, there are moments when the most walled-up heart opens and lets out its oppressive secret. One of those moments, ever fleeting in certain natures, arrived for the Count on the day when, prompted by my imagination, as treacherous as it was fertile, I ventured to trace the silhouette of Doña Magdalena, model of Christian virtues, emblem of other times and other ages when the hearth smelled of incense like a sanctuary, and the family had the solid structure of granite.

“For heaven’s sake, say no more!—exclaimed my companion, leaving off poking the fire and turning toward the portrait as one turns toward an enemy.—The grossest error of all that can be committed is to judge the past by the impression its relics produce upon us. An empty husk, the imprint of a fossil in stone, what truth can a portrait, a piece of furniture, or a ruined edifice tell us? Dreamers like you are the ones who have falsified history, poeticized the most prosaic things, and embellished the most horrible. In no era was humanity better than it is now; but past iniquities are forgotten, and a daubed canvas full of cracks suffices to overwhelm us with discontent for the present. Since you too fall into that most vulgar and dreadful prejudice that great virtues have been lost to us, you deserve that, in order to disabuse you, I tell you Doña Magdalena’s story, just as I have extracted it from our archives and other documents... which rest in judicial records!”

That lady whom you are looking at, portrayed in her bombazine doublet and modest kerchief, upon marrying my great-grandfather, bringing him a rich dowry and the earldom of Lobeira, showed herself passionate to an incredible, despotic, and furious degree. My great-grandfather passed for the handsomest youth in the whole province, and Doña Magdalena for a fanatically devout young lady: it was whispered that she wore a hair-shirt and scourged herself every night. Whether true or not, as for her husband, Doña Magdalena put a hair-shirt upon him, and even fetters, so that he should not leave her side for a single minute. Shortly after the wedding, those who saw the Count pale, emaciated, and dejected, spread the absurd rumour that his wife was giving him herbs and philtres to subjugate him and to make the torch of conjugal love blaze more fiercely.

This state of affairs lasted without being altered by the birth of several children. Nevertheless, after ten or twelve years of marriage, it was observed that the Count, having taken a liking to hunting and making frequent excursions through the mountains—for they spent long seasons in the country, at the ancestral manor of Lobeira, according to the custom of the grandees of that time—was recovering a certain cheerfulness and seemed rejuvenated.

Since I am not gauging the dramatic interest of my tale, but telling it to you unvarnished and without adornment—the narrator observed at this juncture—I will say at once what brought about the Count’s improvement. It was that, his wife’s vampiric passion having somewhat abated, he was able to breathe and live like other people. You will object that Doña Magdalena’s whole offence consisted in loving her husband excessively, and that this deserves pardon and even praise. Were I to argue so delicate a point, I should fear offending your ears with some unseemly notion. I will merely indicate that there are a hundred ways of loving, and that the holy name of love sometimes covers our barbarous egoisms or morbid aberrations. Enough; a word to the wise... I continue.

As secrets are sometimes kept well in country villages, Doña Magdalena was rather slow to learn that her husband, on returning from the chase, was wont to rest in the hut of a certain peasant who had a lovely daughter. It was indeed so: the Count of Lobeira preferred to the succulent dishes of his stately kitchen the coarse cornbread and fresh milk served by the charming lass, who, with innocence in her eyes and laughter on her lips, came solicitously to entertain him. Doña Magdalena, once informed, did not imagine for a single minute that a pure idyll existed there; she saw from the first instant sin and injury. And perchance she was right: I do not pretend to excuse my great-grandfather, although the chronicles affirm that his fondness for the tenant’s daughter was honest and simple.

The historical fact is that, on a very dark and long winter night, the door of the manor opened noiselessly to admit a robust, sturdy man, clad in the classic costume of the province, now almost disused. The Countess awaited him in the vestibule: she took him by the hand and through a dark passage led him to an inner chamber, lit by a wax candle placed in a solid silver candlestick.—It was the oratory.—Behind the crimson damask hangings that draped it, which the lady drew aside, the man saw a gap opened, like a cavern; a somber hole. I repeat what I said before: I seek no theatrical effects; but even if I sought them, I believe none could be so terrible as to state without further circumlocution that the man—a tenant, in the customs of those days almost a serf of the Countess—was the very father of the lass whom the Count was wont to visit; and that Doña Magdalena, showing him the dark recess, warned the peasant that there they would conceal the Count’s corpse. Thereupon she handed him a new, sharp, keen-edged axe.

Did that man fear for his daughter’s life and his own? Was he impelled by cowardice or by traditional respect for the house of Lobeira? Was it the suggestion that a resolute woman of violent passions exercises over an uncultured brain and an irresolute, weak will? Was it greed, the temptation of gold ounces and rich jewels that the outraged wife offered him as the price of blood? The fact is that if there was resistance on the peasant’s part, it lasted very little. According to his confession, he crossed himself (an atrocious detail!), took off his shoes, grasped the axe, and followed the Countess to the chamber where the Count was sleeping. And while the lady lighted the way with the wax candle from the oratory, the peasant dealt one blow, another, ten blows upon forehead, face, and chest... The sleeper uttered not a sound: it seems that at the first axe-blow he opened wide, terrified eyes... and then, nothing. Sheets, mattress, axe, and the dead man, all was cast into the hiding-place; the Countess washed the stains from the floor, closed the trapdoor, and cramming the murderer’s pockets with gold, dispatched him with orders to cross the Minho and make for Portugal.

A rumour, vague at first and then most persistent, arose concerning the disappearance of the Count of Lobeira. His wife spoke of journeys occasioned by a lawsuit; and in the oratory, beneath whose floor lay my murdered great-grandfather, the holy sacrifice of the mass was celebrated daily, attended by Doña Magdalena, just as you see her portrayed there: pale, grave, modest, surrounded by her children, who lovingly kissed her hand. In those days there was no press to pry into mysteries, and the coincidence of the Count’s disappearance with that of the tenant and his daughter, the pretty lass, gave rise to the suspicion that Doña Magdalena’s husband was living very comfortably in one of those corners that lovers know how to find. There were not lacking those who pitied the abandoned lady, around whom respect mounted as the tide mounts. On seeing her pass, straight, gaunt, ever clad in black, men bared their heads.

And thus an entire year went by.

On the very day it was completed, at a short distance from the manor of Lobeira, a man was discovered fast asleep; it was the Countess’s tenant; and the other peasants, who stood about waiting for him to wake, were struck dumb when, on coming to himself, he loudly confessed the crime, loudly denounced himself, and loudly demanded to be taken before justice. There are moral phenomena that no reasoning satisfactorily explains: half our soul is plunged in shadows, and no one is capable of foreseeing what wild beasts would issue from that cavern if we insisted on exploring it. The peasant, when asked the motive of his conduct, declared with rustic arguments that he knew it not; that an irresistible urge—a whim of the mind, as they say nowadays—compelled him to leave Portugal and see the manor once more; and that on catching sight of it, a lethargic, equally invincible sleep overcame him, and once awake, an impulse to confess, to speak the truth, to be punished—because doubtless, I reckon, his frail soul could not bear the weight of the secret which Doña Magdalena’s manly soul kept impenetrable and tranquil.

She was arrested, of course, and in the prison of Marineda they still show the dark dungeon where the Countess of Lobeira languished for many months... The peasant was hanged; and to save my great-grandmother from the scaffold, the estates of my house were heavily mortgaged. Justice devoured with hearty appetite so succulent a morsel, and our decline dates from then.